How much crazier can Black Friday get?

by Chris Hawley - Nov. 27, 2011 12:00 AMAssociated Press

NEW YORK - Pepper-sprayed customers, smash-and-grab looters and bloody scenes in the shopping aisles. How did Black Friday devolve into this?

As reports of shopping-related violence rolled in this week from Los Angeles to New York, experts say a volatile mix of desperate retailers and cutthroat marketing has hyped the traditional post-Thanksgiving sales to increasingly frenzied levels.

With stores opening earlier, bargain-obsessed shoppers often are sleep-deprived and short-tempered. Arriving in darkness, they also find themselves vulnerable to savvy parking-lot muggers.

Add in the online-coupon phenomenon, which feeds the psychological hunger for finding impossible bargains, and you've got a recipe for trouble, said Theresa Williams, a marketing professor at Indiana University.

"These are people who should know better and have enough stuff already," Williams said. "What's going to be next year, everybody getting Tasered?"

Across the country on Thursday and Friday, there were signs that tensions had ratcheted up a notch or two, with violence resulting in several instances.

A woman suspected of showering Black Friday shoppers with pepper spray surrendered to authorities but was released pending further investigation after she refused to discuss the incident, police said Saturday.

The woman, whose name was not released, is suspected of firing pepper spray into a crowd in order to clear a path to a crate of Xbox video-game players that were being unwrapped late Thanksgiving night at a Los Angeles-area Walmart.

In Kinston, N.C., a security guard also pepper-sprayed customers seeking electronics before the start of a midnight sale.

In New York, crowds reportedly looted a clothing store in Soho. At a Walmart near Phoenix, a man was bloodied while being subdued by police officer on suspicion of shoplifting a video game. There was a shooting outside a store in San Leandro, Calif., shots fired at a mall in Fayetteville, N.C., and a stabbing outside a store in Sacramento, N.Y.

"The difference this year is that instead of a nice sweater, you need a bullet-proof vest and goggles," said Betty Thomas, 52, who was shopping Saturday at Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh, N.C.

The wave of violence revived memories of the 2008 Black Friday stampede at a Walmart on New York's Long Island that killed an employee and put a pregnant woman in the hospital.

Black Friday -- named that because it puts retailers "in the black" -- has become more intense as companies compete for customers in a weak economy, said Jacob Jacoby, an expert on consumer behavior at New York University.

The idea of luring in customers with a few "door buster" deals has long been a staple of the post-Thanksgiving sales. But now stores are opening earlier, and those deals are getting more extreme, he said.

"There's an awful lot of psychology going on here," Jacoby said. "There's the notion of scarcity -- when something's scarce, it's more valued. And a resource that can be very scarce is time: If you don't get there in time, it's going to be gone."

"The whole notion of getting a deal, that's all we've seen for the last two years," Williams said. "It's about stimulating consumers' quick reactions. How do we get their attention quickly? How do we create cash flow for today?"

Shoppers return

The holiday shopping season got off to a strong start on Black Friday, with retail sales up 7 percent over last year, according to the most recent survey. Now stores just have to keep buyers coming back without the promise of door-buster savings.

Buyers spent $11.4 billion at retail stores and malls, up nearly $1 billion from last year, according to a Saturday report from ShopperTrak. It was the largest amount ever spent on the day that marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season, and the biggest year-over-year increase since 2007. Chicago-based ShopperTrak gathers data from 25,000 outlets across the U.S., including individual stores and shopping centers.

Online shopping was strong as well, with a 24.3 percent increase in online spending on Black Friday, according to IBM, which tracks sales at 500 online retailers.